Summary

The article advocates leveraging one's 9-to-5 job as a rich source of content for building an online audience.

Abstract

The article encourages individuals to view their full-time jobs as a valuable resource for creating engaging content. It suggests that the everyday experiences, challenges, and insights gained from a 9-to-5 job can be transformed into compelling stories and educational material. The author emphasizes that by sharing personal work-related failures, frustrations, and experiences, one can teach and connect with an audience. The article also highlights the advantage of being at the forefront of industry trends and insights due to constant exposure at work, which can be used to establish credibility and provide fresh content.

Opinions

The author believes that the 9-to-5 work environment is an untapped source of stories and lessons that can be shared online.
There is a sentiment that the common negative perception of the 9-to-5 lifestyle is misguided and that it can be a "gold mine" for content creation.
The article posits that personal growth and learning from work experiences can be translated into teachable moments for an online audience.
Frustrations encountered in the workplace are seen as opportunities for content creation, specifically by proposing solutions to common workplace issues.
The author suggests that experienced professionals can guide beginners in their field by documenting and sharing their day-to-day tasks and responsibilities.
Sharing industry trends and insights from one's job is recommended as a method to quickly gain credibility and keep content current and relevant.

Your 9-to-5 Is Your Content Gold Mine. Use It.

Reimagine your work life

Your 9–to–5 is a huge opportunity.

Stick around on the internet for more than 5 minutes, and you’ll be sold the dream that the 9-to-5 is the worst thing to happen since KFC changed their chips (the first time) and the way to live your dream life is to quit and work for yourself.

Most people are too busy jumping on the hate train of the 9-to-5 to realize that it’s a golden opportunity — a content gold mine if you want it to be.

I’ve been writing on the internet alongside my day job for the last 3 years and it’s the perfect place for endless stories.

Let me explain I use my 9-to-5 to tell stories on the internet.

Teach through your failures

Maybe you’ve worked in the same role for a while, maybe you’re new to it — whatever you are, you’ll have stories.

If work is good for one thing, it’s good for stories, it is your job to find the story and tell it in a way that makes people want to read. Here’s where I’d start:

Run through your last 6 months, ask yourself:

What were the moments I felt out of my comfort zone?
What was the result of the experience?
What did I learn?

Use that as a framework to teach from the lessons you’ve lived. Lace in your personal story and people will love it. It’s a great place to start if you want to build your audience on the internet.

Use frustration as a lever

We’ve all been in that meeting where everybody is rolling their eyes.

It’s a car crash and you wish someone would jump in and save it. And here, if you look closely, there is an opportunity to create content.

Instead of sitting in frustration, as Michael Caine would say: ‘use the difficulty’:

Ask yourself how would you make things better?
Work up 5–6 ideas that would improve the meeting by 10%.
Then write about it

Of course, this doesn’t have to be a meeting. It could be a 1–2–1, a presentation, an observation. Anything. If you’re getting frustrated, use it as a content idea.

Guide your audience through your experience

If you’ve got a few years of experience in a specific profession, you’re in a good position. It means you’ve been around long enough to know what not to do and those lessons are super useful for people just starting out.

Write down the key elements of your role:

What are your responsibilities?
What are your day-to-day tasks?

Then write down a step-by-step of all of them. Let’s work through an example to bring it to life. Let’s say you’re a marketing manager, and one of your day-to-day tasks is working on campaigns.

Here are some content ideas:

My 6-Step process to building a marketing campaign
9 Things Most Marketers Get Wrong About Designing a Marketing Campaign
8 Mistakes I Made Designing Marketing Campaigns

Use your experience as your starting point for content and teach people what you know and what you do.

Showcase industry trends and insights

If you work 9-to-5 you're ahead of the curve in your industry.

You’ll likely be the first to know about new data, new trends, new news — because you’re looking at it all day every day, you know where to look and what is working.

One simple way to use your 9-to-5 to fuel your part-time creator business is to share what you’re seeing. Sharing the latest is a real-quick way to gain credibility because you know what’s fresh.

Readers like to be ahead of the curve.

To build your thing without quitting the day job, join 18,000+ creators in the part-time creator club. Get more guides at: The Part-Time Creator Club.